Our First Experience Dry Camping aka Boondocking

I had to Google this "RV'ing" term at first, because the myriad of YouTube videos we watched all spoke about this term, but never truly defined it. It is rv camping without electric, water & sewage hook up. This was interesting, because with hook-ups, we made a few mistakes as I spoke about in my last blog; so what did we learn? Never leave the hose on after flushing the poo tank!

This time, we thought we were ready to boondock at this beautiful resort in Northern North Carolina for an FPV event (first person view drone flying freestyle) for hubby & kiddo.

The location was picturesque; an old fashioned clubhouse atop a hill, with rolling valleys of abandoned stables & a golf course as well. Unfortunately, it's being sold for a housing community, so our little spot on the hill will no longer be.

We learned the hard way about setting up on an incline....our whole rig shifted forward quite a bit, despite using chucks, stabilizers & the gizmos to go in between the tires.

Our inverter had a relatively short cord, so hubby had to park the vehicle with it in the bed in order for it to connect to the power. Boy that was a different noise when trying to sleep!

At one point, the temperatures got down to 34 degrees, which to us Floridians, is super cold! Fortunately, the fireplace in our rv gives off heat without using propane, so we were able to stay warm.... until we ran out of gas on a very cold & early Sunday morning.

Being that we were in a very secluded & small town, none of the gas stations were open yet! So we got dressed quickly & got toasty in the clubhouse on the top of the hill.

We procured gas finally later that day, then the oil decided to dry out later & of course, it was still super cold out....note to self: bring extra gasoline & oil if you're boondocking!

Once that mess was fixed, it was time to depart. We decided to boondock again once it got dark at a super Walmart after we utilized a free dump station at South Of The Border in SC. This was our first Walmart overnight stay, but our worries were settled once we saw about a dozen other fellow RV'ers also doing the same thing.

It was a nice night out, but we still needed power for showers, light, etc. So we fired up the full (this time) inverter & kept our truck connected to the rig. Hubbs tried to keep the inverter a bit "hidden," from any potential thieves by keeping it under the tonneau cover, but as I suspected, it choked itself to a sputter. Then the exhaust burned a hole into our rhino liner of the truck bed, as well as melting a bit of our extension cord. This was definitely another lesson learned: don't set up camp in the dark! And if you must, make sure your inverter or generator has plenty of gas, air, and oil. Also, pick a good place for it when using it. We may just get a chain for it. Not sure how to remedy this one.

If anyone has any ideas, please leave a comment!

I'll be writing more soon, so stay tuned!